Skills Lists

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Are you ready for the 20th or 21st Century?


Bloom's Taxonomy
Gardner's Five Minds
Perkins & Tishman's Thinking Dispositions
Costa & Kallick's Habits of Mind
Pink's Essential Aptitudes
Jenkins' New Skills
Mishra & Koehler's Transdisciplinary Skills
Downes' 21st Century Skills
IFTF's Future Work Skills
Wagner's Survival Skills


Bloom's Taxonomy
  • Old New
  • Knowledge - Remembering
  • Comprehension - Understanding
  • Application - Applying
  • Analysis - Analyzing
  • Synthesis - Evaluating
  • Evaluation - Creating


Howard Gardner - Five Minds for The Future
  • The Disciplined Mind
  • The Synthesizing Mind
  • The Creating Mind
  • The Respectful Mind
  • The Ethical Mind


David Perkins & Shari Tishman - Thinking Dispositions
  • The disposition to be broad and adventurous
  • The disposition toward wondering, problem finding, and investigating
  • The disposition to build explanations and understandings
  • The disposition to make plans and be strategic
  • The disposition to be intellectually careful
  • The disposition to seek and evaluate reasons
  • The disposition to be metacognitive


Habits of Mind as identified by Costa and Kallick
  • Persisting
  • Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision
  • Managing Impulsivity
  • Gathering Data Through all Senses
  • Listening with Understanding and Empathy
  • Creating, imagining and Innovation
  • Thinking Flexibly
  • Responding with Wonderment and Awe
  • Thinking about Thinking (Metacognition)
  • Taking Responsible Risks
  • Striving for Accuracy
  • Finding Humor
  • Questioning and Posing Problems
  • Thinking Interdependently
  • Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations
  • Remaining Open to Continuous Learning


Dan Pink - A Whole New Mind - Six Essential Aptitudes
  • Design
  • Story
  • Symphony
  • Empathy
  • Play and Meaning


Henry Jenkins - From Henry Jenkins' group
  • Play - the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
  • Performance - the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
  • Simulation - the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
  • Appropriation - the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
  • Multitasking - the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
  • Distributed Cognition - the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
  • Collective Intelligence - the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
  • Judgment - the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
  • Transmedia Navigation - the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
  • Networking - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
  • Negotiation - the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
  • Visualization - the ability to interpret and create data representations for the purposes of expressing ideas, finding patterns, and identifying trends


7 Trans-Disciplinary Habits of Mind - Punya Mishra Matthew J. Koehler Danah Henriksen
  • Perceiving
  • Patterning
  • Abstracting
  • Embodied thinking
  • Modeling
  • Deep Play or Transformational Play
  • Synthesizing


Stephen Downes
  • emergent thinking: extracting patterns, rules, regularities, prototypes
  • sensing value - finding meaning, truth, relevance, purpose, goals
  • acting semiotically - using signs, signals, art, desig, etc., to do things
  • seeing beyond - describing, defining, drawing conclusions, explaining data
  • ecological sensitivity - placing in context, seeing frames, making meaning
  • living in change - understanding flow, adaptation, progression
    * These are literacies that reflect the times and not simply the fact that we have a lot of machines.


Future Work Skills 2020
  • Sense-making
  • Social intelligence
  • Novel and adaptive thinking
  • Cross-cultural competency
  • Computational thinking
  • New-media literacy
  • Transdisciplinarity
  • Design mind-set
  • Cognitive load management
  • Virtual collaboration


Tony Wagner's 7 Survival Skills
  • Critical thinking and problem-solving
  • Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
  • Agility and adaptability
  • Initiative and entrepreneurialism
  • Effective oral and written communication
  • Accessing and analyzing information
  • Curiosity and imagination

Idit Harel's 3 X's
  • eXploring
  • eXpressing
  • eXchanging ideas

Balancedtech's Favorite Links on 21stCenturySkills from Diigo